Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script)

by David Collins-Rivera

  John did it, but then I had to search around the system map for a while in order to find what it was that the mixed-up hand gestures from our two Sensor Speshes had displayed for only a second.

  "Okay...here..."

  A single spacecraft's vector. The only transponder note for it was the name: Jaybird. No call signs. No vessel class listing.

  It started at the station, then moved out into a solar orbit, traveling about one quarter of the radius around the star.

  Then the vector simply...stopped.

  "Is that a glitch?" Chris asked.

  "No, uh..." Reluctantly, he looked to Stinna, who had been giving him a gruff face (or maybe not -- I wasn't sure). This interested her, and she took over.

  "It's probably a gap in the data, but it's not stating that it is..."

  "Did it blow up?" I asked. "A missile test, maybe?"

  "No," SS2 replied, dropping menus and looking at the underlying data in list form, "there would be special notations for that."

  "Well, whatever," I concluded, after a few long seconds, "I just thought it was odd. It's not worth a lot of effort."

  "No," Chris put in, "keep looking. I want to know what that was."

  So the two of them waved at the image above, then moved to tablet displays they both had, since these were more practical for digging through heavy vector details. John even started tearing into the underlying code for the sensor feed application, while Stinna was boring into the database.

  It was taking time, so I just finished my meal, then went back to Gunnery to check on the diagnostics. Along the way, Dieter finally appeared, exiting Engineering as I approached.

  "Oh, hey. Awake?"

  "Yeah. I slept in," I replied.

  "Last to be revived, more like."

  "Oh?"

  "Yep." And he gave me a tight smile. We just stared at each other for a moment. "Boy, I'm hungry." And he pushed on past.

  I watched him go, feeling miffed.

  The gunner gets the least respect. Over and over, I ran into this.

  Until the missiles were flying, we were so much dead weight. Then it was all...What do we do?! What do we do?! On a quasi-peace mission, it was only going to be worse.

  My diags were finished, and I noted a buggy recall on sensors. It was normal for things be a bit off-true after starjump, especially with brand new equipment. It would take an hour or two of recalibration, but was otherwise a simple fix. I reset everything to facory specs, then let it run some alignment scripts.

  On a job like this one, every single thing that you did had to be logged and verified, so I started on that part right away. In fact, I could see that the paperwork would be my single biggest time-suck, and wanted to get into a working routine, so it didn't pile up. Chris, as ML, would have to check off on several of the reports I spat out, and I didn't want to be handing him stuff that was post-dated.

  After that, I ran each weapon's self-test function. Gunnery relied on readiness. I needed to start simming hypothetical battle scenarios with the current data as soon as possible. This represented the Situational Status of the ship and its surroundings. If I got poor returns, I had to be instantly sure the parameters I chose were at fault, and not the equipment.

  It would take time, and each separate weapon system, including safeties and backups, had to be logged and manually signed off on, so that the customer (in this case, United Humanity) could be absolutely sure that the Gunner on their contracted mission had been personally aware of each and every variable in the equipment. There was also a vid feed of all my actions in Gunnery that was being cached as a separate log file, to which no one aboard had access. This level of accountability was excessive, but UH had big clients of their own to answer to -- nations and such -- so they were enthusiastic i-dotters and t-crossers. That made me one, too.

  Still, this rankled me.

  It was a gunnery job, yes, and it was good pay. But no respect. Never respect. We were in what could be seen as a hostile star system. Still, the gunner was last to be awakened, and the first to be forgotten.

  I just needed to get through this thing with a good recommendation. Then, maybe I would move on to something in the training field, just like Siddel suggested. Something regular and well-paid.

  I had a plan, after all, and I sure wasn't going to let people with lousy attitudes...

  A call from Chris, up front, jumped into my field of view, and I had to collect myself before responding.

  "We might have found something, Ejoq. Can you come forward? We need an expert opinion."

  "Sure. Be right there."

  Expert?

  Hmmm...

  Okay, now I felt guilty.

  I turned my seat around to face the door, and disconnected an input lead and a few monitor cables I'd plugged into my wristcomp so as to run some of my own diag applications. I hit the door latch and got up.

  Maybe these guys weren't so bad.

  Then again, they only called because they wanted something...

  ||||||||||

  The brightness came from the ship's exterior floods, but there was a gleaming haze, too, and from all directions.

  It looked only meters away.

  A hissing/sizzling noise came through the plastic hood, over my terrified, gasping breaths, as the air outside the suit spread out and destroyed itself. It passed through the termination point of this pocket dimension, hitting a wall that wasn't there.

  The universe was just a tiny mote of reality in an endless sea of nothingness, not even vacuum.

  Outside this bubble, matter and energy simply ceased to be: there were no laws of physics to support them. The air threw back a telltale mist of high-energy protons and photons, as its molecules were unzipped and dashed into memory.

  But then more light flashed, much brighter this time, in shades of watery red, and I heard a metallic scream as the deck segment tumbling away met a similar fate as the air. That wasn't a minor energy bath.

  And if I hit the edge of the bubble, I would disappear as well!

  ||||||||||

  three

  * * *

  "It's not in our mandate!" I argued, and even made the hopeless attempt to win the point with the actual written statement we'd all signed, which I tried to call up on the Tri-D overhead. I couldn't find it right away, and dropped the effort as the conversation went on.

  "He's right," Stinna agreed, and I think she started to do the same. Or maybe not, because she would have found it for sure, but never did produce the stupid thing.

  "UH didn't send us all this way just to come back empty handed," Chris replied. "They want information. And right now we don't have any."

  "We actually have a lot," John corrected, and brought up a long list of analyses the Sensor Spesh team had collated already. He spread it out, overlaying on half of Stinna's window.

  "Hey...!"

  "We have facts, but what do we really know? I mean, think about it: they have a ship of the line posted here to protect something. If it's not a military build-up, at least that part is a military action."

  "Again," I stated with a shake of my head, "it's not why we're here."

  "As Mission Leader," Chris countered, "it's my call."

  "This isn't the mission you're supposed to lead."

  He stood back and studied me for a bit, his athletic build highlighted in his tight short-sleeves.

  "You honestly aren't curious?"

  "Of course I am," I replied, "but that's not what UH wants, and anything we do from this point on is simply spying. We're supposed to help keep a treaty, not break one."

  "They don't know we're here, am I right, John?"

  "They have no idea," SS1 agreed, and brought up another table of data, overlaying it on the other half of Stinna's window.

  "Hey!"

  Chris thought about it for a while, studying first John, then me, and then the lists.

  "Okay, we'll do it this way: despite the data, and despite the expert opinions aboard, I, as Mission Leader and
Meerschaum management representative, am still unconvinced that this isn't a military build-up, and I want a closer look."

  "But that's not true," Stinna stated simply.

  "It is if I log it that way," Chris replied with a tight smile.

  There was nothing more to argue at this point. The boss wanted to take a closer look.

  "Okay," I conceded with a shrug, "where do we go?"

  "Mavis," he called forward, "how long would it take us to get to that station?"

  She brought up a navigation map of the system on the Tri-D, controlling it from her cockpit chair. Orbits and vectors blanketed the entire display, covering up the last of Stinna's window.

  "Come on!"

  "Sorry," the pilot offered, her voice piped to the display's speakers so she didn't have to shout.

  A dotted course line projected a possible circuitous route for us around the primary, and over to the station's general location. Several minor changes Mavis had made in our exact orbit and approach appeared as calculations to one side, and the vector line adjusted accordingly a second later.

  "If we're still looking to be subtle," she concluded after a few moments, "I can get us in that neighborhood in about forty hours."

  "Sounds good," Chris pronounced. "Lay in the course, and let's get going."

  Stinna had closed all the displays on the Tri-D except her own, but now no one was looking at whatever point she never tried to make, so she humphed, and closed that one too.

  "All this for some ghost data?" I asked the ML.

  "I'm not convinced it is," Chris argued.

  "Neither am I," John added.

  Even Stinna nodded, saying, "The vector line wasn't a product of incomplete data. It just stopped."

  "Well, if what you showed me was all you had," I stated, "I'm not willing to say it was a spacecraft that was destroyed. First off, there was no identification for it, no transponder on the standard channels -- just that name: Jaybird. With the resolution of our sensors, we should definitely have seen signs of an energy burst and debris if it had exploded. There's nothing. I don't know what else to say except that, whatever Jaybird was, its vector did continue on, but sensors somehow missed it."

  "Even if there was a hiccup," SS1 debated, "if we project the vector out further in the same apparent orbit, we still get nothing."

  He brought the now familiar system map up once again, creating a time-lapse projection of the orbital line. It was colored dark green until the point where it stopped, then continued on in a lighter shade around the star.

  "See?" John reasoned. "We don't pick it up again. It's just gone."

  He emphasized this point by accelerating the time-line by several hours. The vector never reappeared from the far side of the star.

  "Maybe it changed course during that time? Left the area? It could even have been destroyed when it was out of our sight."

  He thought about that a bit, then opened the view even wider. Stinna helped organize the depicted data, and objects and spacecraft that had been tracked by Shady Lady during that sequence of events appeared on the display as she plugged in the appropriate tables of information. John then re-ran the timeline.

  "See? Still nothing. If it was destroyed, you'd think someone would go take a look. It's just gone."

  "Could this be some kind of stealth technology?" I asked, feeling really stumped. "Something they can just turn on and off?"

  "Well...I don't know," SS1 replied thoughtfully. "Maybe. But then why didn't they turn it off? There's no sign of it in any similar orbits, even if we go ahead for days." And he did so, with dozens of other vectors spinning around the primary crazily.

  "Wait, wait, wait," Chris commanded. "You're making me dizzy. Center it on the station this time, and run the timeline. Maybe it comes back at some point."

  So he zoomed in on the space station over at the Lagrange point, and reset the timeline.

  "Okay," John said, as the depicted hours ticked off in the corner of the image, one every couple of seconds. "And...right about...now. This is when the vector stops over near the star."

  "Slow it down, we'll just watch," Chris muttered, as the timeline progressed. John cranked it back to about one minute per second. A couple small vessels came and went in the first hour depicted, their ID's announcing them as a shuttle and two maintenance bots.

  We kept watching.

  Two hours further on, an unidentified vector arrived at the station, and was taken fully aboard.

  "That's it!" Chris cried, stabbing the image above our heads and throwing strange shadows. "Zoom out and replay it."

  With the map surrounding the Lagrange point pulled to a larger view, the Sensor Specialists manipulated the data to add extra detail, and then progressed the timeline once more. The mysterious vector just...appeared in Mylag Vernier's general vicinity, and proceeded to it at moderate speed.

  "No waaaaay..." I breathed, not believing what I saw.

  "Further out, further out!" Chris ordered, plainly as stunned and excited as I was -- as we all were now.

  The map reformed to fully encompass Lagrange Point 2, as well as the orbit that the vanishing vector had used. John played it forward in slow motion, and all of us gasped -- even Mavis, up in her cockpit, watching on her own feed.

  He did it again, and it was no less stunning. Finally, John rewound it to just before the disappearance, and let it play in real time.

  The mysterious vessel cruised along easily, and then vanished. Immediately, it -- or one exactly like it -- appeared nearly eighty million kilometers away. It was now only a couple hours' reasonable ride from the station.

  Chris reached up and rewound it himself, this time going all the way back to when the vessel, whatever it was, first started on its little voyage.

  "It takes that thing nearly a day to reach that solar orbit," he stated, though we could all see it plainly, "then it instantly jumps back here."

  Dieter had been sitting back for most of the arguing, looking as hung-over as usual, and, for the most part, hardly seemed to care one way or the other. But he'd been startled by this, just like the rest of us, and now he leaned forward.

  "You say jumped, Chris, but it didn't. It couldn't. It's impossible for any vessel this deep into a system's gravity shadow to transition into or out of jumpspace."

  That was a simple fact. One we all knew.

  Since the dawn of so-called faster-than-light travel, it had been the one reality that everyone, everywhere lived with and understood. Starjump was impossible within high gravitational distortions. Such a field extended like a shadow into the artificial pocket universe created by a starship's jump engine. Only in the absence of such a strong field could starjump be initiated. Even trying it on the periphery of one ran the heavy risk of a misjump.

  That kind of accident could range in severity, from minor inconvenience, to true catastrophy, depending upon the degree of space/time imbalance. It was, therefore, standard practice to fly well out of a gravity shadow before ever initiating a jump. Most well-trafficed systems had stations and settlements at or near the edge of a star system's shadow, so as to minimize travel times. It was as deep as a ship could ever make a jump to or from a system: an understood and accepted reality of star travel.

  "Give us any graviton readings recorded during this period," Chris ordered. John immediately pulled up a dialog of options off to one side, chose one, and inserted the new data into the model overhead. He replayed it, and there they were, clear as day: an exit and entry cone coinciding with the magic, skipping vector line. In fact they were extremely obvious and unusually large, now that anyone thought to look for them.

  "Well that just doesn't make any sense," I stated stupidly, disbelievingly.

  Stinna just looked around at us all.

  "This is some kind of research project, right?" She asked it as if it were the easiest thing ever to comprehend and accept.

  "Well, then this is..." I started to say, but stumbled.

  "...huge," Chris finished for m
e, replaying the timeline again. And then again.

  "Bigger than huge!" I burst out. "It changes everything!"

  "I'll say!" Mavis put in, agreeing loudly over her shoulder from up front. "Anybody with engines like that could travel right to their destination without using main drives at all! They could just jump from one station to another directly, and never need to ride in from the edge of the system."

  "It would save weeks of travel." Dieter agreed. "You'd be there instantly. I mean, if your calcs were sharp enough, you could even travel from planet to planet, without ever entering space."

  "What would subjective time inside the jump bubble be like?" John wondered aloud.

  "I have no idea," Dieter replied, studying the looping replay, "but that aspect might not have been studied much yet. If the engineers haven't started multi-system starjump trials, then the ships likely haven't gone far enough for them to be able to measure that with accuracy. Assuming Jaybird experiences the same kind of time distortion as a normal drive, then this trip right here would have taken...oh, I don't know. A second or two? From the crew's point-of-view, I mean. It was instantaneous in our dimension, anyway, just like normal. But a new paradigm might mean a new set of ranges for Temporal Displacement. Outside of theory, there'd be no way to know until someone tries."

  "Once word gets out," Chris pronounced, "every ship in space will want one of these engines."

  He glanced at me now with an air of triumph.

  "Still want to go home?"

  * * *

  We had been able to maintain a slow, steady approach to our new orbit.

  Trusting in the mojo and know-how of the stealth technologists who had designed Shady Lady's outer hull was not easy for me. This whole cloak-and-dagger thing was new and, frankly, quite uncomfortable. I really didn't intend, even now, after discovering something so amazing, to pursue this kind of work anymore. If there was a way to parlay it into a better position, with less risk and quasi-legality, I'd definitely be searching for it.